Warner Bros confirms 35 Ultra HD Blu-ray releases this year

Home Entertainment will be offering four titles on Ultra HD Blu-ray at initial launch showcasing 4K Ultra HD resolution with High Dynamic Range (HDR), offering consumers a sharper, brighter and more colorful home entertainment viewing experience than ever before.

The Blu-ray Association (BDA) set out its new standard for 4K discs in 2014, with support for 3840 x 2160-pixel resolution and frame rates up to 60 frames per second. “Blu-ray authoring tools on the 2016 scheduled 4K Ultra HD Disc releases of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Chappie, Hancock, Pineapple Express, …”

Sony is strangely absent from the upcoming crop of Ultra HD Blu-ray players. Meet the Panasonic DMP-UB900 Ultra HD Blu-ray player.

Best of all, at least for some of these studios, numerous movies will also come with HDR contrast augmentation metadata programmed into them -something which will fit nicely with the HDR capabilities of all three new UHD Blu-ray players which we know are emerging soon from Philips, Panasonic and of course Samsung. First up was Panasonic, who unveiled its very first 4K Blu-ray player in the form of the DMP-UB900.

Will Ultra HD Blu-ray players have to be connected to the Internet to play 4K discs? In comparison, current dual-layer Blu-ray discs can store up to 50GB.

Samsung took to CES 20016 in Las Vegas to unveil the pricing details for its Samsung UBD-K8500, one of its first 4K UHD Blu-ray players. It promises to deliver “audiohphile-quality reproduction of any source”.

It will play its part in a multi-room system (following a future firmware update) and is loaded with codecs for audio handling, up to 192kHz 24-bit and double DSD, with two channel output to your hi-fi or receiver via a 32-bit DAC. Consumers, however, won’t be able to transfer a copy from their player’s hard drive directly to a portable device. In November, NMS became the first facility to have passed the official Blu-ray Disc Association First Product Model Verification (FPMV) under Commercial Audio Visual (CAV) Profile 6.0.